New Civ Crash Program

[PresidentMarcos]

These are just some ideas. If I get a sufficient team, I will begin work.

First of all, instead of the traditional square isometric tiles, there would be a hexagonal tile, which would be around 1 km in area. This would be processor intensive, but if a comp can handle 3D first person shooters, then it can handle this. Roads, railroads, rivers, and maglev tubes would pass around the exterior of the tile, and through the middle. Elevation would be indicated by "peaks," lines that would rise up from the middle of a hex. Each peak would be connected to all 6 neighboring peaks, by another line, called a "ridge," allowing for topographical terrain. The result would be similar to the terrain system used in SMAC, albeit with a more faceted, boxy look. However, this would be part of the charm.

In the new game, there would be Future Ages, and a Space Layer, as there was in CTP. This would add additional depth to the game, allowing for Space Colonies. Space Colonies would be like Cities, except in space.

Cities themselves would be different. Instead of occupying just one hex, as their population would exceed a certain figure, they would expand in size, the area taken up by the city increasing, and increasing. If it got big enough, cities would even merge, creating sprawling megapolises.

Resources would be important to unit, building, and Wonder construction. Certain tiles would have deposits of certain resources, such as Minerals, Money, Wood, Oil, and the like. Basically, there would be a number of important resources, namely Food, Money, Metal, Wood, and Oil. Food and Money would be harvested in small amounts by the city itself, but if one had a citizen work on a tile with a farm in it, or a trade good on it, one could harvest more of that resource. The same goes for Oil Wells, Forests, and Mountains, where Oil, Wood, and Metal is found, respectivelly.

Each turn would be one day. However, you could skip ahead a month or so, if you were impatient. You would just give the orders, and enter the amount of days to skip ahead, and wait. If you enabled a certain option, certain Advances would not be available before a certain date.

Everything else would be the same as in any other Civ game.

Now for the team, I need:

1. A graphics technician
2. Beta testers
3. Someone good with AI

[Leland]

Originally posted by PresidentMarcos First of all, instead of the traditional square isometric tiles, there would be a hexagonal tile, which would be around 1 km in area. This would be processor intensive, but if a comp can handle 3D first person shooters, then it can handle this.

Think about the scale... the Earth's total area is around 510 million square kilometers. That translates nicely to half a billion tiles in your game. So, if you use only one byte per tile, the map will take half a gigabyte of memory... two bytes, and it's one gigabyte, and so on. Ditto for space layer. I'm not really familiar with the inner workings of current state of the art FPSes but I don't think they are quite that complex yet.

And that's just the memory, not even talking about how long it's going to take to process the whole map.The two are actually kind of complementary... you can reduce the memory requirements by compressing the map, but that increases the processing power needed.

Each turn would be one day. However, you could skip ahead a month or so, if you were impatient. You would just give the orders, and enter the amount of days to skip ahead, and wait.

And wait. And wait. And wait. If we assume that you have a super fast computer (which will be the norm in a few years, mind you) that can go update the whole half-a-billion-tile map in, say, 5 seconds (which is a ridiculously optimistic estimate), skipping one month will take 2 and a half minutes. Skipping a year is going to be half an hour's wait. And if the game starts around 2000BC (just handwaving, I have no idea what kind of time scales do you have in mind), it would take 85 days to finish the game (i.e. get to year 2000AD or so) if we assume that you play 24 hours a day and give all your orders while the game is still processing the previous turns.

Not that there's anything wrong with crazy ideas, but hopefully you realize the scale you're trying to tackle.

Now for the team, I need:

1. A graphics technician
2. Beta testers
3. Someone good with AI

You have all the coders you need already?

[LDiCesare]

Beta testers you'll find easily here, but you should worry about coders first.
About ai, you should also specify what you mean: Do you want a coded ai (and in what language) or a scripted one (and which scripting language)?
About art, you may find people, but probably need to give more details about what you want/need.
Anyway, without coders, the rest is useless, and these are the hardest to find. Maybe you can do it all by yourself?
Good luck anyway.

[PresidentMarcos]

Hmm...Alright. Make the tiles 100 km in diameter, then...

[Hommer]

Just limit the world by Tropics. The very North and very South is unimportant for the world history.

I say it because I don't like when my country is involved in game.

[The Viceroy]

Pres Marcos,

You don't actually have to have a hexigon map when creating your data model, you can actually use a flat 2d grid.

Here's how it works. .

To see what I mean by diagram :-
Take a normal grid system, and for every column but 1, lift it by .5 square. Now for each square you have 6 possible moves.

Represented in a real grid, those moves could be (where x,y is the current point)

(x-1,y+1)(x,y+1)(x+1,y+1)
(x-1,y) x,y (x+1,y)
(x,y-1)

Of course, you can shift it around in any direction..

As for the GUI, you simply represent each square as a hexigon ..

nice and simple

the fun starts when you make it a globe, and connect the north/south, east/west

[Nebula]

Actually making such big maps does not require each tile to be stored. You could generate large sections and build the world with that. You could for instance generate a small map and the generate tilemaps based on a fraction of this map. Also what is not used does not have to be stored. Only what is used. If a player really wants to have such realism he should expect to reserve a large section on his hd(s).

Skipping ahead years or months would take a considerable lenght. But if you only take into account a few variables and update those and fake further change it would not be so hard to make it fast.
Creating code that realisticly simulates worlds still requires super computers and then only partial. Faking and cheating is the thing to do in todays games.

[The Viceroy]

Of course, you can opt for a simple mathematical function (such as decimal places in PI) and map the contents to a map, so you would never even need a map, but that would not help if you want to construct a real world, or allow user construction of a map.

Certainly, the idea of only mapping what is actually touched is a good one, but I think half the problem is wasteful coding. You can use a single byte to represent 256 different variations .. another byte and you've got 2 bits of information which hold 256 variations .. some items such as "None/Road/Railroad/Maglev" (for example) could be simply 2 bits in size .. I see no reason to extend each tile data beyond 3 or 4 bytes ..

So a 1024x1024 map (much much larger than any civ map ive played before) would only be 43Mb in size ..

OK, now that would be a hefty amount for a 128Mb machine, and even a 256Mb (depending on the size of all the other bits of data and code), but 512Mb is starting to become quite usual, and lower spec PC's can always shrink the map down.

Question is, would anybody want a Civ game with 1024x1024 maps ??? ha ha we could have a full game, taking a full lifetime

[Nebula]

Question is, would anybody want a Civ game with 1024x1024 maps ??? ha ha we could have a full game, taking a full lifetime

I personally think it would be a challenge in coding and playing. Real warfare can be fought over enourmous masses of land but still the armies must find eachother at key locations.
Like you would be able to build your country then invade another and occupy its major cities and destroy the major resistance. Further automatic features could restore balance and you would be able to move on to the next country.
Countries with a lot of resistance but not large organized resistance could be a troubled area in the kingdom. You would have your own vietnam or afghanistan to tend to.

To conquer the entire world you could again 'defeat' the major opponents and let automatic features quell the less dangerous elements. This way in stead of fighting for each city and square one could use more realistic methods of global conquest.

Though micromanagement would be impossible with such huge maps. When starting out it would but later tweaking states and major cities would be the only good method.

[The Viceroy]

I agree, the model you pick to manage your civ certainly is more important than size. In the real world most nations have a handful of major cities, and large number of small to medium sized cities, and much more village and below type dwellings.

It simply is not possible to rule all parts of any empire, no matter how much power you have, you cannot make every decision, and for a large modern nation, the most you can hope for is a guiding hand on all the top level stuff.

However, a game isn't the real world, and would probably be deadly boring if it was, and trying to hit the balance between game play and reality is something i see debated here at Apolyton all the time.

My own personal opinion regards to the extent of automated management is, give the play the option to manage or be managed, and let the auto manage be a tad more variable than it currently is, each player then has to find a style that satisfies them.